If you love gardening, it is indeed great that you can grow your own fruits and vegetables that you can be sure are grown healthy, especially if you do organic backyard gardening. Aside from making your vegetables free from pesticides, you can also learn how to make organic compost as alternative for commercial fertilizers.
Learning how to make organic compost in your own backyard can save you money from buying fertilizers and allows you to help restore the natural fertility of the soil in your backyard garden, also allowing you to make easy choices of vegetables to plant in your backyard. It is also a good practice in eliminating waste and putting them into good use.
Composting is actually easy as most of the job is done by nature itself. You just have to learn about the correct ingredients and its proportion and give some time to mix it periodically- and then you can have your own organic fertilizer.
Compost Ingredients
If you are interested in learning how to make organic compost, there are three main ingredients that are important- the 'greens' or the materials rich in nitrogen, the 'browns' of those rich in Carbon, water and air. The greens are the garden waste that mostly includes grass clippings, garden waste as well as leaves. The greens also includes kitchen waste such as fruit and vegetables peels and other kitchen waste that are not meat products and are not greasy. It can also include animal manure from farm animals including poultry. Keep in mind that dog and cat waste should not be included in your compost. Kitchen waste such as fish or cooked food should not also be included in your compost.
You can include in your 'browns' some twigs in the garden, sawdust, cardboard and waste paper, small branches you get from pruning, wood shavings.
Water is also essential in making your own compost as this will allow the materials to rot. However, it is important to put the right amount of water into your compost heap because making it too dry will not decompose the materials in your compost and making it too wet will not make a good compost as well. It will only make it smell bad, which means you are cultivating the not-so-desirable bacteria in your compost. Allowing air to get through your compost will also hasten the process.
How To Make Organic Compost - The Easy Steps
You can start with your compost by putting all the materials you have gathered in your compost bin. Make sure you are putting in almost equal amounts of 'greens' and 'browns' and you are having a mixture of the soft materials as well as the hard ones to allow it to rot easily. Add manure to heaps of waste paper to make the rotting process fast. You can also add garden soil to your compost heap.
You can then return to your compost heap once a week to turn it out from the outside. You will determine that you are getting the compost right because it will become hot in the middle of your compost. Also add water each week if you do not get enough rain to moisten the heap. Remember not to make it too wet but just enough to moisten it.
When you feel the compost is not giving off heat anymore, you can then leave the compost to rot and decompose by itself. In about one or two month's time, you will be able to achieve a dark brown compost ready for your organic garden.
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